Electrochemical Biosensing of Algal Toxins in Water: The Current State-of-the-Art

Due to increasing stringency of water legislation and extreme consequences that failure to detect some contaminants in water can involve, there has been a strong interest in developing electrochemical biosensors for algal toxins detection during last decade, evidenced by literature increasing from 2 journal papers pre-2009 to 24 between 2009 and 2018. In this context, this review has summarised recent progress of successful algal toxin detection in water using electrochemical biosensing techniques. Satisfactory detection recoveries using real environmental water samples, good sensor repeatability and reproducibility have been achieved, along with some excellent limit-of-detection (LOD) reported. Recent electrochemical biosensor literature in algal toxin detection are compared and discussed to cover three major design components: 1) biorecognition elements, 2) electrochemical read-out techniques, 3) sensor electrodes and signal amplification strategy. The recent development of electrochemical biosensors ha...